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Illicit use of stablecoins reached a five-year high in 2025, even as overall stablecoin activity surged past $1 trillion in monthly volume multiple times. That contrast sits at the heart of new findings from TRM Labs, where the numbers show scale while the structure reveals where risk actually lives.
TRM estimates that illicit entities received around $141 billion in stablecoins last year, a figure that looks stark in isolation but reads differently once placed in context. Most of the increase came from sanctions-related activity, not from a general rise across scams, hacks, or ransomware.
2025 RECAP | Illicit Stablecoin Activity Surged to 5-Year High in 2025 with Over 80% Used for Sanctions Evasion
Illicit goods and services, human trafficking, and industrial laundering networks: These showed near-total stablecoin adoption, reflecting a need for price stability… pic.twitter.com/ghcEVz6Jlk
— BitKE (@BitcoinKE) February 20, 2026
Sanctions-linked flows accounted for about 86% of all illicit crypto activity in 2025. Nearly half of the stablecoin total, roughly $72 billion, was tied to A7A5, a ruble-pegged token whose activity sits largely inside sanctions-focused ecosystems. The pattern suggests reliance, not experimentation.
These networks aren’t loose collections of wallets but instead resemble cross-border financial systems that use stablecoins to move value without price swings or banking access.
Stablecoins solve specific operational problems by settling quickly, maintaining liquidity, and removing volatility from large transfers. That makes them well suited for sanctions evasion and organized money movement.
TRM’s data shows uneven use by crime type. Illicit goods and services and human trafficking networks show near-total stablecoin adoption. Payment certainty appears to outweigh any upside from holding volatile assets. Scams and ransomware look different, often beginning with bitcoin or other assets before shifting into stablecoins during later laundering stages.
That split matters for policy design and enforcement priorities. Treating stablecoins as a single risk misses where enforcement pressure should land.
The sharpest concentration appears in professional facilitation. Guarantee and escrow services tied to laundering expanded rapidly from 2022 through mid-2025, peaking above $17 billion in quarterly volume. About 99% of that activity was denominated in stablecoins, TRM says. These services operate as settlement layers, not trading venues.
Front-company exchanges show a similar profile. TRM highlighted platforms such as Zedcex and Zedxion, which presented as retail exchanges but primarily moved value for high-risk networks. Between 2024 and 2025, roughly 83% of incoming volume to those platforms arrived in USDT. In January 2026, the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned both entities for ties to Iran’s financial sector.
The U.S. Treasury's OFAC sanctioned UK-based crypto exchanges Zedcex and Zedxion for helping Iran evade sanctions, marking the first time OFAC has targeted digital asset exchanges for involvement in Iran’s financial sector.
OFAC also designated seven Iranian individuals,…
— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) January 31, 2026
Despite the headline number, illicit activity remains a small slice of total usage. With annualized stablecoin flows near $12 trillion, the $141 billion figure represents about 1% of volume. That sits below estimates for illicit finance in the global economy overall, reinforcing that the takeaway isn’t that stablecoins drive crime, but that certain actors depend on them for scale.
The data sharpens the debate. Stablecoins now function as payment infrastructure. Risk concentrates where they underpin sanctions evasion and industrialized laundering, not across everyday use. Enforcement that targets networks and facilitators, rather than the instruments alone, is likely to matter most as stablecoin adoption keeps growing.
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